Secondary stat question for BM hunters

Post by messiah77

Hi all, I have a question regarding the order for secondary stats for being a BM hunter. I've tried 3 websites and they all say different things, EJ says to go with an equal amount of crit and mastery, Noxxic and Mr Robot both are saying that mastery for BM is the worst stat even behind haste.

Now I'm a little bit confused I have to admit as to which way to go, I am currently SV but find myself enjoying my BM spec while questing and doing dailies more fun and am considering changing back to BM for raiding if I could get a straight answer as to which secondary stat is best for BM hunters.

PS. I know that reaching hit and expertise caps are the most important and am already capped so it's just whether or not it's crit/mastery > haste (as per EJ) or crit > haste > mastery (as per Mr Robot and Noxxic)

Post by Nooska

Noxxic and Mr Robot goes to much by sims, EJ post is done by simming and constroctive analysis.

I have to say "EJ is correct" as I'm the one the keeps that guide, but I do have to correct, it doesn't say to go with an equal amount of crit and mastery, but that crit and mastery are roughly equal in worth (and as you increase your crit your mastery becomes worth more relatively, but by small enough amounts to not be a deciding factor in the current tier).

Personally I don't reforge crit/mastery pieces unless I need ti rearrange for hit/exp caps, and I reforge haste (or excess hit/exp) to mastery before crit, because unlike crit mastery does not have a hidden diminishing return built in (as crit can be capped, each point of crit is infitessimally worth less than the previous point) - also I like to load the damage output into the pet, as it also affects our big nuke.

Now Mr Robot and Noxxic have the right that in sims haste comes out ahead, this is mainly due to the way sims handle haste - in an unrealistic way. Haste does exactly 3 things for us;1) Increases our passive focus regen (and by extenstion our pets passive focus regen)2) Increases our active focus regen by lowering casttime on CoS3) Increases our frequency of autoshots (and thus actively increasing the pets focus regen via Go for the Throat) and by extension our pets autoattacks

For active focus regen for the pet, Crit works better. Thanks to GftT, crit is also better at increasing our pets focus regen overall, than the active+passive benefit of haste.For 2, we have to look at what a 6 second cycle will look like, as its based around KC, our main nuke.(will continue later, have to go out right now)

Post by Nooska

Continued:

For 2 we have to look at our 6 second cycle.Kc will take up 1 second of the 6 second cycle, leaving 5 seconds. These 5 seconds are used primarily on rotational abilities; AS, CoS, GT, and once in a while they are used for cooldowns that incur a GCD, like LR, MoC, DB, Stampede.Rotationally DB intrudes the most as its on a 30 second cd and thus only just outside GT's 20 seconds - it could be included in the rotational abilities.So, 5 seconds, 2 focus costing rotational abilities and 1 focus generaing ability.At 0 haste we have a perfect 5 gcds with CoS simply taking 2. To fit in another shot we need 100% haste for a rotational cycle with 1 CoS, and 33% haste for a perfect fit on 2 CoS cycles.

Looking at our abilities we have Focus Fire that will give us 30% haste every (3/0.4)*5 seconds (provided the pet has enough focus) - it will on average light up every 37.5 seconds, in reality we should look at a binomial distribution, but for this, the average is fine, lets round it up to 40 seconds though. This means that we will have an uptime of ~50% of FF if the pet has enough focus. Now the use of FF increases the generation of focus for both hunter and pet passively (by 30%) and actively - for the pet by 30% from more autoshots going out that have crit%*40 focus per on average - and for the hunter by reducing CoS casttime to where we can fit 2 CoS and 2 instants in our 5 seconds between KC.

During our FF uptime, we need 2% haste to perfectly fit in the CoS without delaying KC (and it is worth delaying the KC by the 0.3 seconds it will be delayed at 0 haste).We further have Rapid Fire, increasing our haste by 40%, with an uptime of 15 seconds/3 minutes, with a double at 0 and 5 minutes, so with readiness used at 6 minute intervals (it pays to delay it till RF+LR are off CD at ~6 minutes 15 seconds in any fight that lasts for ~7+ minutes due to LR and RF) we have an active RF uptime in a 10 minute fight of 15% giving us a personal haste cooldown uptime of 65%. For the remaning 35% of the fight, hasterating can give us some benefit, which means that analytically, we can only value the contribution of haste rating in the non hasted parts of the fight by 35%.Basically, the more hasted we are, the less haste benefits us (as we will already easily be generating a good deal of focus under FF and RF) - crit and mastery work equally well hasted and non hasted, and especially crit feeding into active pet focus regen will feedback to hunter regen through Invigoration - the more the pet can do basic attacks the more focus we get back, and the more focus we gain, the less we need to use CoS - though we sitll need to do 1 CoS every cycle to extend SrS by 6 seconds (very neat - we have a 6 second cycle, and we need to extend SrS once per cycle to keep it up indefinately). We will sometimes want to do 2 CoS to gain focus for more AS and to use KC on CD, so some cycles willl have 1 CoS and some will have 2.

The 50% of the time we have FF, a 0-haste cycle will be either KC, 2xinstant, 2xCoS or KC, CoS, 3x instants and wait .47 seconds (so realistically, 2xCoS+2xinstants is better).The 50% of the time we don't have FF, a 0-haste cycle will be either KC, 2xCoS, 1xinstant or KC, 1xCoS, 3xinstant.

Since KC CD isn't affected by haste (like paladins) we only see the full benefit from haste at intervals where we gain a full GCD, so in no-FF its at 33% and 100% haste, and during FF its 2% and 70% haste respectively.Constructive analytical result is that 0-2% haste is ideal, as it lets us benefit from it fully for most of the time - 33% haste would be next to useless for 50% of the time during FF since it is not enough to get us to the next shot.

Now sims will calculate focus more effeciently that any human ever can in a real situation, so it can optimize shots, and the high value of haste in sims comes primarily from shotshifting, so X haste exchanges for instance 1 CoS with 2 AS over the course of a fight - something we would never see in reality due to not being machines, and due to fight svarying a little bit - resulting in that X haste being a net gain over the same amount of crit - however in a real situation, crit and mastery being always on and having no real thresholds* means that they are worth more outside the sims.

* crit does have 1 threshold thats important to keep in mind. Thanks to Go for the Throat and the 3 second CD on the pets basic attack there is a soft threshold at around 20% crit where on average the pet will never be focusstarved - accounting for rng, the real threshold is somewhere around 25-30%. At this point crit falls slightly in value as it no longer increases the amount of pet attacks, but shifts some of them to double damage (see Claw). At this soft threshold Mastery overtakes crit as a damage contributor (only slightly though, and crit will still jump ahead in sims when it allows one more basic attack that was "lost" to a double damage attack, or allows one more double damage attack).

So crit~mastery until ~25-30% crit(buffed) then mastery>crit, and haste is next to worthless.

Post by messiah77

Post by ragnorak6608

Thank you for posting this question messiah77 and thank you for such an in-depth answer nooska. I have been trying to figure this out for quite some time now. Time to go reforge my stats and change up some gems. Ill repost to tell you how it turns out :)

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